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Josh Quittner of Time magazine analyzed Google's potential strategic goal of pushing iGoogle with the recent "artist themes" logo, concluding it's a move against Facebook... as OpenSocial is part of Google's widget approach. An interesting bit from the article: "iGoogle currently accounts for 20 percent of visits to Google's home page," according to a Google. (Not sure if that's just measuring the US homepage, though – there's much too little background given on this number.)

" * There are tens of millions of active users on iGoogle worldwide * iGoogle was one of the fastest growing Google products in 2006 and 2007, and continues to grow * Approximately 50% of iGoogle users are in the U.S., with large user bases in the U.K., France, Japan, Germany, Canada, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands as well * iGoogle is available in 42 languages and 73 domains"code.google.com/apis/igoogle/d ...

You could also find the no. of users by adding the numbers listed for each iGoogle theme: google.com/ig/directory?type=t ... (even though some users might use more than one theme)

for some location, if you go on google.com without ever been logged in to a Google Account, the first page you will see is iGoogle, saying "Welcome to iGoogle, your home on the web".It's a kind of auto-hijacking...

Oh, I didn't notice the obvious: the number of iGoogle's unique visitors may be 5% from Google's visitors, but those people visit iGoogle more often to check their news, agenda etc. So 5% of Google's visitors could account for 20% of all visits.

Might also be that among iGoogle users, significantly more (or less) use Google as their browser homepage (loading it up whenever the browser starts). A number that would be interesting to know is how many users who are logged in currently switched to iGoogle.

"That's because you've previously clicked on iGoogle and set a preference in the cookie."I installed Ubuntu on a friend's laptop, the default page was google.fr/firefox. So I changed it to google.fr. It redirected automatically to iGoogle, and there wasn't any cookie set.